MSNBC/WSJ: Students and Symapthizers OCCUPYING Building at UC Berkley/ Elsewhere

[Sabotage]

we're just supposed to sit on our asses and complain on this forum and accept the doom is what this sounds like to me.

ya know i get off on doom. but do i actually want this shit to happen to us? NO FUCKING WAY! fuck the crisis!

i get off on doom because it vindicates everything we know, that these fuckers don't give a shit about humanity, and they're willing to kill us all for profit!

[Arraya]

there needs to be resistance, otherwise administrators will do whatever they like.

however, these students are just ignorant and should be pitied.  

the STATE subsidizes (gives for free) 80-90% of actual costs for the universities in CA - the students pay the remainder as "tuition".

the state no longer has any money.

simple consequences.

wipe your tears and go home.

yeah you are right the state has failed everyone in that respect! isn't that what we complain about here at latoc? that this shit is a crisis that was caused by these bastards! we have every right to stand up and say! no more of this system! fuck the crisis! fuck your bailouts! fuck wall street capitalists!

we're just supposed to be like oh well, there is a crisis, deal with it? really??? you fucking insane?

I think you are projecting your rage onto the students.  They are just pissed they have to pay more when some administrator should have his salary cut.  

[Sabotage]

no i am not. have you read like any of the occupation statements or manifestos from these fuckers? do i really have to spoon feed you?

from gjcm: "They've turned off campus wireless. Information warfare in effect" from twitter.

[Sabotage]

occupyca.wordpress.com
occupucla.wordpress.com
wewanteverything.wordpress.com
anticapitalistprojects.wordpress.com
researchanddestroy.wordpress.com
likelostchildren.blogspot.com

[golddust]

Well, when you're looking at 100K in college debt and no jobs in the future, you tend to get pissy.

$100K with lots of high paying jobs after graduation will keep people slaving away, but this scenario makes them wake up. During the great increases of the last 9 years, everyone took out loans. I know, I did it too. But what they don't understand (because of their young age and were kept purposefully ignorant about) is that even if you make 70K right out of college, half your check is going to go to student loans for the next 20 goddamn years, (they will be about 42 on average when they make that final payment) making it so that you actually get more like 35K. Which is what you would be earning if you had went to work right out of highschool and worked your way up in the job market for the next 4 years instead going into debt.

Kids trying to make a good life for themselves are penalized and turned into debt slaves because they can be. That age group is exploited hardcore. I didn't realize I was being exploited, but looking back, abso-fucking-lutely I was and not even just in financial ways. There was at wolf at every door, and they look alot like college counselors and financial aid advisers and customer service reps, etc. They all said, you will never amount to anything if you don't have a college education. There's no desirable jobs for people without college. People with Bachelors degrees earn $100K more over their lifetimes than those without so any college debt is just so worth it over time they all said.

And few have questioned it. Now that they will have debt but no jobs, and be making a fraction of what the previous generation made but paying ten times as much, they are questioning. Hallelujah, they are QUESTIONING the whole fucking thing.

[Sabotage]

The Neoliberalization Of Higher Education: What’s Race Got To Do With It?


As the California population has grown more ethnically diverse, the privatization of the public sphere has been sold to the electorate through a seemingly endless parade of racist bogeymen: immigration, affirmative action, bilingual education.

For children of immigrant parents, for immigrants themselves, for the first to attend college in their families regardless of their ethnicity, skyrocketing fees and cuts occur at a time when we can least afford it. We have been told that the real responsibility for the current crisis of education lies elsewhere: in Sacramento, in a larger economic crisis not caused by Wall Street speculators and bailed out investment banks but somehow by minority communities themselves.

We are told to divert our attention toward our legislators and away from the extreme bureaucratic waste and disastrous internal budgetary priorities of university administrators. We are told to write yet another petition by leaders who simply ignored the minimal demands of the 9/24 walkout and numerous alternative budget proposals.

Senior administrators, many with deep ties to the same Sacramento politicians they have asked students to petition, have refused to submit to an independent audit to prove that student fees are not in fact being used to finance construction projects instead of basic instruction and services. In other words, we have been told to “share the pain” but never the power to democratically decide how public funds are spent and by whom.

Last year UC paid $4.2 billion dollars to its management, or 21% of the systemwide budget, as opposed to the 8% devoted to instruction. Senior executives regularly cite “market competitiveness” as a justification for excessive compensation packages which are not determined by any “market” but by insulated boards which possess the extraordinary power to raise their own salaries.

The internal budgetary priorities of California public universities thus mirror those of the state. In California alone corporate profits have risen 580% since 2001 while for the past 30 years “strategic deficits” and regressive taxation have been used to “starve the beast” of spending on basic public needs like food, affordable housing, education and health care. According to the logic of privatization, none of these public goods should exist.

While fee raises and cuts have disproportionately affected communities of color, we have once again been told that the responsibility for this lies elsewhere. Demands for racial justice and equality are assumed to be incidental or “niche” issues which do not affect “the average student” or “the average worker.”

For decades the UC administration has attempted to isolate the most “diverse” constituency on campus: the service workers. As some of the most courageous and outspoken critics of current university policies, these workers have the most to lose and continue to demonstrate the astonishing power of collective action.

Routinely used as exhibits of victimization and vulnerability, students of color are often viewed as passive and frightened objects rather than radical political subjects who have a crucial role to play in transforming a broken institution.

Shared culture is no guarantee of political solidarity. And so we stand together with all those who are working to build a democratic mass movement powerful enough to challenge the twisted logic of privatization which makes structural racism routine. Neither students nor workers can accomplish this task alone. Current UC leaders are counting on the fact that we remain isolated from each other.

As formerly insulated middle-class communities face economic upheaval and “fear of falling,” they experience what most underrepresented working class communities of color have confronted for quite some time: systematic underinvestment, hyperexploitation and structural barriers to equality written off as individual failure or cultural pathology.

We encourage everyone to join the public conversation about the future of the movement and to take immediate action. We also call on all students, workers, teachers, parents, and their organizations across the state to massively mobilize and organize for a general strike in education beginning on March 4, 2010.

[Sabotage]

more spoon feeding  

Communiqué from an Absent Future: On the Terminus of Student Life

INTRODUCTION: 7 AGAINST POMPEII

WE LIVE AS A DEAD CIVILIZATION. We can no longer imagine the good life except as a series of spectacles preselected for our bemusement: a shimmering menu of illusions. Both the full-filled life and our own imaginations have been systematically replaced by a set of images more lavish and inhumane than anything we ourselves would conceive, and equally beyond reach. No one believes in such outcomes anymore.

The truth of life after the university is mean and petty competition for resources with our friends and strangers: the hustle for a lower-management position that will last (with luck) for a couple years rifted with anxiety, fear, and increasing exploitation—until the firm crumbles and we mutter about “plan B.” But this is an exact description of university life today; that mean and petty life has already arrived.

Just to survive, we are compelled to adopt various attitudes toward this fissure between bankrupt promises and the actuality on offer. Some take a naïve romantic stance toward education for its own sake, telling themselves they expect nothing further. Some proceed with iron cynicism and scorn, racing through the ludicrous charade toward the last wad of cash in the airless vault of the future. And some remain committed to the antique faith that their ascendingly hard labor will surely be rewarded some day if they just act as one who believes, just show up, take on more degrees and more debt, work harder.

Time, the actual material of our being, disappears: the hours of our daily life. The future is seized from us in advance, given over to the servicing of debt and to beggaring our neighbors. Maybe we will earn the rent on our boredom, more likely not. There will be no 77 virgins, not even a plasma monitor on which to watch the death throes of the United States as a global power. Capitalism has finally become a true religion,wherein the riches of heaven are everywhere promised and nowhere delivered. The only difference is that every manner of crassness and cruelty is actively encouraged in the unending meantime. We live as a dead civilization, the last residents of Pompeii.

Romantic naïvete, iron cynicism, scorn, commitment. The university and the life it reproduces have depended on these things. They have counted on our human capacities to endure, and to prop up that world’s catastrophic failure for just a few more years. But why not hasten its collapse? The university has rotted itself from the inside: the “human capital” of staff, teachers, and students would now no more defend it than they would defend a city of the dead.

Romantic naïvete, iron cynicism, scorn, commitment: these need not be abandoned. The university forced us to learn them as tools; they will return as weapons. The university that makes us mute and dull instruments of its own reproduction must be destroyed so that we can produce our own lives. Romantic naïvete about possibilities; iron cynicism about methods; scorn for the university’s humiliating lies about its situation and its good intentions; commitment to absolute transformation — not of the university, but of our own lives. This is the beginning of imagination’s return. We must begin to move again, release ourselves from frozen history, from the igneous frieze of this buried life.

We must live our own time, our own possibilities. These are the only true justifications for the university’s existence, though it has never fulfilled them. On its side: bureaucracy, inertia, incompetence. On our side: everything else.

More after the jump:
http://researchanddestroy.wordpress.com/2009/10/04/communiquefromanabsentfuture/

[golddust]

Fucking awesome, Sabotage.

[Sabotage]

Fucking awesome, Sabotage.

what you said above a few posts is totally fucking true and right! tons of debt and now no jobs = no future! much solidarity to you student to student! i'm sorry for overshadowing what you said as a member of this board, by posting these fucking communiques! fuck having to write communiques!

i'm sure a ton of other doomers will dig these though...

[Chesyre]

think they are mad now , wait till they find out they paid 32 % more to be part time taco bell workers this summer 

[alaskat]

One wonders , how much more will their tuition increase, to pay for the damage done to the facilities!!

[Sabotage]

One wonders , how much more will their tuition increase, to pay for the damage done to the facilities!!

said the fascist civilian killer.

edited for context: alaskat has admitted to fucking up rioters and civilians when he was stationed out in singapore or some such country back in his bafoonery days. need more context search in the thunderdome for alaskat hate threads.

[golddust]

Fucking awesome, Sabotage.

what you said above a few posts is totally fucking true and right! tons of debt and now no jobs = no future! much solidarity to you student to student! i'm sorry for overshadowing what you said as a member of this board, by posting these fucking communiques! fuck having to write communiques!

i'm sure a ton of other doomers will dig these though...

It's all good. I didn't say anything the students didn't say! I'm 28, I haven't been out of college that damn long. I still experienced it during its bubble and immediately after the bubble burst, and got the fuck out because I felt what was coming. And didn't find college to deliver on one single fucking thing it promised me when I walked through the doors. Liars. And I feel for the professors too. Most I know are very intelligent and care. I've met just a few that were asshats.

[Sabotage]

@golddust - there are always asshats.

statement of solidarity from vienna:



Dear colleagues, combatants and, fortunately, friends in Santa Cruz and in California!

Strike signifies the refusal of work.
In our case it means an enormous intensity of labour. For weeks people have been organizing, coordinating, communicating, writing, filming, photographing, cooking, doing media work and much more. We’re all re*learning to formulate demands, utopias, systems and structures, formulate things really as we want them to be, radically and without compromises. We don’t only re*claim our right to stand up and demand, but we re*claim the freedom of thinking, taking action and not only dreaming about changes but to change our everyday life practice. There are worldwide networks, liaisons and friendships being established.

The students and teachers at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (or, as we like to call it: Academy of Refusal) want to emphasize that WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS and we stand in solidarity with you!
Now is the time to stand up, revolt, demand and formulate utopias (and what else could we ever demand)! We all begin to notice that we’re no longer alone with our discontent, the number of occupied universities grows daily, people can’t wait to join the protests!

YOU´LL NEVER BE ALONE AGAIN!

Hugs and kisses of solidarity,

Forever yours

Academy of Refusal

[Ik]

Reminds me of Cornell, the occupation of Ford Hall.

We ain't at that level yet....certainly not peaceful, but the path to Peace is one that has yet to be traveled by the feet of Homo sapiens.

Peace,

Ik